Amy Davidson on what Richard III’s skeleton can tell us about warfare and its lack of limits: http://nyr.kr/WnOPPf

Photograph by Dan Kitwood/Getty.

Alexandra Lange on the “futuristic motors” introduced in “Downton Abbey” S3 E3: “Estate management and modern medicine, suitable jobs for women and what’s to become of the children, all of these will be explored both upstairs and downstairs”: http://nyr.kr/SmJaJY

Lauren Collins responds to Ross Douthat’s New York Times article lamenting the declining American birthrate: “…might not women also be hesitating to have children, or struggling to find a way to do so, in a culture whose conception of family life is so primitive?” 

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/R5HvJo

Photograph: Indigo/Getty.

Last week, the General Synod of the Church of England rejected a revision of canon law which—coming after years of deliberations, defections, redraftings, and often ugly debates—would finally have opened its episcopate to women…

Until last week, neither the Queen nor the Parliament has had to consider the elevation of women bishops—for the simple reason that no Synod had reached the stage of producing a canonical revision to that effect. The difference today is that a revision was produced and rejected before it left the Synod floor—which meant that an arm of the state had pointedly defied the state’s law against discrimination…

In today’s Daily Comment, Jane Kramer considers why the Church of England seems to have a problem with women bishops: http://nyr.kr/UTxpIL

Photograph of Justin Portal Welby, by Frantzesco Kangaris/Eyevine/Redux.

Trenton Oldfield. Jonathan May-Bowles. Names that will not live in history, even if their bearers desperately wish otherwise. The latest entrant to the ranks of these Y.B.A.’s—Young British Assholes—is Vladimir Umanets, who, on Sunday afternoon, walked into the Tate Modern, whipped out a black paint pen, andscrawled the message, “Vladimir Umanets ’12 A Potential Piece of Yellowism,” in the bottom right corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting “Black on Maroon.” 

Lauren Collins on Vladimir Umanets, and the Yellowism movement: http://nyr.kr/OiVLMb

Rebecca Mead on Weymouth, Dorset, where the first two weeks of Olympic sailing events will take place: http://nyr.kr/PHH43O

London gets Olympics Fever (at last): http://nyr.kr/NJW1RR

(Photograph by Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images)

Here come the Olympics! Are you ready? Is London ready? This is the British capital’s third time hosting the summer Games. This first, in 1908, occurred seventeen years before The New Yorker came into existence, but the second, in 1948, was well covered in our pages. Our longtime London correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downes, filed a pair of reports on the Olympiad, which came after a twelve-year hiatus because of the Second World War. Click-through to read some excerpts from Panter-Downes’s 1948 Olympic coverage: http://nyr.kr/LLeYjJ

(Source: newyorker.com)